Book review: Danger in chess - Avni

This is a great little book, from an Israeli psychologist
and chess-player, on a subject that must be on every chess-player's
list of New Year Resolutions: I will not overlook pieces en
prise, I will not miss a mate in two... Avni takes a brisk
look around at blunders and other 'failures in the sensing of
danger', that is, sins of omission as well as commission.

Forgive me if you've seen this particular sin of omission
before, but it was a perfect recent illustration of Avni's
themes:

Now Black played 13... a4 missing 13...
Bxa3 winning a pawn. If 14. bxa3 Black wins the exchange by
14...Qc3+; and if 14. Rxa3 Black recovers the piece by
14...Qxc1+.

These two ideas are very simple, and if we are alerted to
the possibility of a tactical blow here, I imagine most of us can
look for and find it. But without suspecting danger, the two
strongest players in the world missed it!

As well as welcoming its subject matter (not another
Solve all your opening problems forever title from
Batsogan Digest), I also welcomed its approach, its
use of examples and exercises, and his
recommendations which attempt to remedy the ills it
diagnoses.

Avni has a determinedly common-sense approach to his
topic and avoids psychological jargon (for example, Krogius' book
talks about "failures of selective attention", not a form
of words I found easy to get on with). He has collected together
dozens of examples of chess blunder and oversights and has assigned
them to three main classes according to the suspected cause of
error: the opponent (e.g. when the opponent plays
incomprehensibly), the position (e.g. when the situation
looks familiar) and more general failures of thinking (e.g.
neglecting defence while attacking). He also talks
interestingly of integrating cues from different sources.
This catalogue may sound like Abrahams' 'varieties of error', but
Avni is much more clear and robust, less anecdotal, than Abrahams'
tour.

Each category of error, and each point he makes
throughout, is illustrated with two or three examples from actual
games, each with a diagram. This makes much of the book possible to
read without a board. Moreover, Avni does not intend to allow you
to read passively, but continually presses you to apply yourself to
problems and exercises.

Avni has done his homework very well: he has clearly
trawled the chess press for good examples but has also read widely
among the various books and papers that have been published on
chess psychology. The book is packed with titbits from journals and
books, as well as Avni's own chatty but pointed observations. From
his collation I was interested in de Groot's notion of
discrepancy, which was new to me: de Groot wondered
'when does a chessplayer look for an improvement to his
intended move?' and concluded that it is when the result of
analysis is at odds with the player's expectations - "the
discrepancy being a signal that something is
probably amiss" [1] (author's italics).

[I don't know how far this explains the K-K incident: was
there no discrepancy for the players? Or, for a GM Caro-Kann
player, was a3 just the sort of move that White shouldn't be
allowed to get away with? Nonetheless, this idea of discrepancy has
given me food for thought in looking at my games.]

The book concludes with a series of about a dozen
recommendations for players and coaches which I found very helpful.
It is so easy to recognise a chess disaster, so hard to prevent the
next one. For example, to Avni and his colleagues we owe the
discovery that strong, experienced chess players score higher for
paranoia on the MMPI[2] than do weaker players
and non-players. His recommendation: adopt a paranoid
approach (at least at the chessboard). An example of how
this might be done: rather than comfort yourself with the thought
that you cannot possibly lose, think instead how could I
possibly lose this game? Search for a possible
catastrophe.

This advice is, as ever, illustrated with examples: the
one which made me wince was from Nigel Short, whose paranoia must
have been running particularly low against Belyavsky at Linares in
1992:

1 Nd5 f6+, 2 Ke6?? Bc8 mate...

A couple of stray thoughts:

1. His evidence for his suggestion that (amongst other
habits) we should cultivate paranoia this is essentially
negative: he gives further examples of
failures of suspicion which led to instant losses by
strong players. Perhaps, since disease is so often the route by
which we can gain insight into normal functioning of the body, this
is quite right, but I am dogged by the suspicion that these are
actually examples of unusual and unsuccessful chess thinking, and
we know little of the usual kind. I know of a few examples of
normal or more successful chess thinking: I remember some old
articles by Simon Webb in the Chess magazine of the late
1970s under the title 'How do chessplayers think?' which
tried to capture (live) some chess thinking, the fascinating (if
retrospective) comments that were the appeal of the BBC Master
Game series, and a couple of odd comments by annotators (like
Fischer's "...Trifunovichseemed too quiet all of a
sudden" [3] ). Perhaps readers know more.
But my judgement is that, even in chess, which seems to me an ideal
arena for research, we know little about how we go about chess
decisions, what makes a difference between weak and strong players,
and how to improve. This, really, is what makes a book like Avni's
so interesting.

2. A technique that Avni uses more than once is to give
you similar positions and ask you to puzzle out which one has the
catch. This is very different to the usual type of calculative
exercise that I have seen (as in the Winning Combinative
Play or Find the Winning Continuation columns of
magazines). Knowing there is a problem which has a solution, I can
sit and puzzle out the answers to most of these up to, say,
five moves deep[4]. And yet, like
many club players, my games are pocked with oversights
two moves deep. Even some of the games I survive can
be busted in short order by my modest computer. Now, if books on
tactics had half their positions with only tempting but bogus
tries, or a third of positions which were promising but which had
no tactical solution yet available, this would be a much sterner
and more realistic test. Does any publisher wish to take this
on?

I had only a couple of minor quibbles, but the
conscientious reviewer feels obliged to note them:

1. There are of course many different things to consider
when choosing a move, and unless you find yourself with time to
spare in each game (not true for me, I'm afraid) you may have to do
something else less often or more quickly if you are to become more
self-critical or more chessically paranoid. At the moment I fear
that after reading Avni I will only make judgements more accurately
while calculating less deeply, unless I can find a way to analyse
faster. Avni does not try to address this issue, but rather treats
the topic of developing a sense danger as a separate add-on to
whatever you do normally.

2. I did wonder if the number of pages per pound is good
value. As chess publishing has become more computerised, with great
benefits in speed and accuracy, I had hoped that some savings might
trickle down to the purchaser. I think that chess books have been
getting worse value rather than better, but perhaps this is merely
my chessplayer's paranoia!

3. There were some recommendations I expected to see and
didn't! They are: write your move down first and check it (which I
owe to Simon Webb), and when analysing, always look one move
further for at your opponent's possibilities at the 'end' of a
combination (Dvoretsky).

[4] I can even survive some of the
examples from the section on 'Traps' in Livshits' Test your
Chess IQ: Grandmaster Challenge (Cadogan, 1993), an
otherwise excellent book, because firstly, the fact that they are
in a section on "traps" turns the paranoia dial up to 11, and
secondly, he offers give-away comments like "White was hoping
for 1...Bxf4, on which he had prepared a counter-blow. What was
it?".